THREE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN AN ACADEMIC AND AN INTELLECTUAL: WHAT HAPPENS
TO THE LIBERAL ARTS WHEN THEY ARE KICKED OFF CAMPUS?
by Jack Miles

If the academic tills one field and
the intellectual is a hunter pursuing prey across many fields, which
one is unemployed?

JACK MILES is Senior Advisor to the
President at the J. Paul Getty Trust and author of God: A
Biography. Portions of this paper began as a keynote address to
the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, San
Francisco, November 1997.

As more and more colleges and universities adopt the market model,
providing students not what tradition says they need but what the
students themselves say they want, the liberal arts are being squeezed
out of the curriculum. A recent article in Harvard magazine
contains the following instructive paragraph:

Between 1970 and
1994, the number of B.A.s conferred in the United States rose 39
percent. Among all bachelor's degrees in higher education, three majors
increased five- to tenfold: computer and information sciences,
protective services, and transportation and material moving. Two majors,
already large, tripled: health professions and public administration.
Already popular, business management doubled. In 1971, 78 percent more
degrees were granted in business than English. By 1994, business enjoyed
a fourfold advantage over English and remained the largest major.
English, foreign languages, philosophy, and religion all declined.
History fell, too. . . On the Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude
Test, only 9 percent of students now indicate interest in humanities. . .(1)

The liberal arts are not gone yet, but they seem on their way out of
an American higher education establishment increasingly defined by the
narrower needs of the American economy. The authors of this article,
English professors both, offer their statistics as a call to educational
reform, to a revival of the liberal arts. But their own evidence
suggests that such a revival is most unlikely and that, if the liberal
tradition is not to die, American culture may need to find another
carrier for it.

The Academic Labor Question

Distinct from but related to the decline of the liberal arts on
campus is the deprofessionalization or proletarianization of college
teaching. In the academic labor market as elsewhere in the American
labor market, the goal of management is, increasingly, to keep the
number of permanent, salaried employees as small as possible by
transferring as much of the aggregate workload as possible to temporary
employees who are paid on a fee-for-service basis and receive few if any
of the costly benefits provided their salaried colleagues. Writing in New
The Republic, Michael Walzer has noted that a recent, notably
successful United Parcel Service strike was not a conventional strike
for higher wages but rather collective resistance to the planned
transformation of the UPS work force from one of full-time workers with
salaries, job security, and benefits into one of part-time workers with
no one of the three. Walzer goes on to note, however, that this very
transformation is far along in academe, where

an increasing
proportion of undergraduate teaching is done by adjuncts and assistants
of various kinds, who work on short-term contracts and cannot expect to
have normal academic careers. It is now possible to imagine an economy
in which the American workforce will be divided into a full-time elite
and a large number of harried, unhappy and exploited workers rushing
from one part-time or temporary job to another, always insecure, barely
able to make ends meet. . . Maximum efficiency requires, so
the world was told in 1840 and again in 1997, though not in so many
words, disposable workers -- men and women who will work long
hours or short, "as necessary," and disappear without
complaint when the necessities change.(2)

How large a phenomenon is Walzer talking about? Barry Munitz --
former chancellor of the California State University, now CEO of the J. Paul
Getty Trust -- estimates that more than fifty percent of all class hours
in higher education in California, private as well as public, are taught
by such disposable academic workers.(3)
A statistical case can be made that if all classroom hours now taught by
fee-for-service adjunct faculty were taught by salaried permanent
faculty, the Ph.D. glut would suddenly become a shortage. Thus, Mark R.
Kelley and William Pannapacker, president and vice-president of the
Graduate Student Caucus of the Modern Language Association, assert:

We cannot emphasize
strongly enough that, were it not for the radical increase in part-time
faculty positions, there would be no oversupply of Ph.D.'s. Indeed, if
all college and university teaching were performed by full-time faculty
members who held doctoral degrees, we would be facing the undersupply of
Ph.D.'s predicted in 1989 by William G. Bowen and Julie Ann Sosa in
Prospects for Faculty in the Arts and Sciences: A Study of Factors
Affecting Demand and Supply, 1987 to 2012. Ironically, it was their
predictions, widely disseminated in the popular media, that led so many
current graduate students and new Ph.D.'s to abandon other careers and
pursue doctoral study.(4)

Whatever the exact proportions of the tradeoff, it is clear that as
the proportion of classroom hours taught by adjuncts grows, the
likelihood of salaried employment for new Ph.D.s will shrink and that it
will do so even if graduating classes of new Ph.D.'s also shrink
somewhat.

Tenured faculty, the aristocracy of the university, have been
disgracefully complicit in the creation of an academic helot class to
subsidize their own upper-middle-class salaries, but the helots are
progressively replacing the aristocrats as the latter retire and are
replaced by helots rather than by other aristocrats. What is being
phased out, in short, is the very career which tenured faculty once
enjoyed and to which new Ph.D.s still vainly aspire.(5)
This career, although it included teaching, was not narrowly confined to
teaching in the way that the work of adjunct faculty is narrowly
confined -- indeed brutally reduced -- to teaching. For a while to come,
some of the many aspiring professors who enter the academic labor market
each year will find tenure-track positions and be awarded tenure in due
course. More, however, will fail to obtain tenure or even to be hired
for a tenure-track position. Barring a labor movement of unprecedented
scope, the less talented among them will then sink into academe's
permanent underclass, while the more talented will leave academe and
seek other employment.

X = (academics - academe) + (university library - university)

Just here is where the story grows culturally interesting. If half (a
conservative estimate) of all humanities Ph.D.s graduating after June
1998, join the already large number of their kind who have no permanent,
salaried academic employment, then a body of expertise exists outside
academe which, reinvested, could -- in more ways than one -- step into
the breach created by academe's progressive disinvestment in the liberal
arts. These off-campus humanists may become, in other words, the default
carrier of the liberal tradition.

The phrase free lance is an interesting one to recall in
this connection. Its opposite, never used, is paid lance or soldier,
ultimately from the Italian soldiere, meaning one who receives soldi,
that is, a salary. In the American academic context, three questions
abut one another when we ask where and how academics displaced into the
general labor market -- soldiers become free lances -- might succeed the
academic institutions that think about them so little.

First, will free-lance writers and thinkers unsalaried by
any college or university ever coalesce into a new form of intellectual
army, an organized liberal arts alternative to academe?

This prospect is more plausible than it might at first seem. George
Dennis O'Brien, in a book entitled All the Essential Half-Truths
About Higher Education, writes:

The rise of adjuncts
may be seen largely as an objectionable management ploy to balance the
budget, but regular faculty on their part may well respond to the new
economics of education by quite a different mechanism. A clear example
of a possible strategy would be the "franchising" movement in
Great Britain. The University of Aberswych decides that it cannot afford
to teach a specific discipline, (physics, for example), so it franchises
that area to the University of Bosthlewaite, whose faculty are more than
happy to receive a portent of steady employment. The next step is
obvious: the faculty at Bosthlewaite form a private consortium of
physicists. . . and franchise services in various locations
throughout the United Kingdom. . . Instead of a specific
university having to load itself up with a permanent staff of faculty
who may in time become redundant or dull, the university can contract
with the Einstein Consortium to supply physicists. Physics, like food
services, will be "outsourced."(6)

But if regular faculty can organize to create this "quite
different mechanism," so can adjuncts themselves. And if they do
not organize themselves, others may organize them. For venture capital
moving into online education, they constitute a fully trained and
readily available workforce and therefore a potential business asset.
Adjunct faculty are a resource for commercial online education in the
way that foreign physicians or others with off-brand medical degrees
were and are a resource for the "managed care" insurance
companies that have diverted so large a portion of the health care
revenue stream to themselves.

Second, whether or not college teaching is reorganized in
this way, are there other cultural institutions in this country that may
be inseminated by an academic immigration? Is it possible to imagine the
displaced academics of the country as internal refugees, analogous to
the talented Jewish intellectuals who fled Europe for the United States
when Hitler came to power?

Third (the likeliest outcome, I believe), will the
experience of displaced or never-placed academics in nonacademic venues
ever fuse with their academic training to produce a new, more
avocational style of liberal arts research and publication? For the
monks who preserved and redefined the liberal arts in the Middle Ages,
secular learning was an avocation rather than a vocation. If the liberal
arts cannot be a gainful occupation for more than a few, then an
American secretary of culture, if we had one, would want to know who
might keep the tradition alive by pursuing it as an avocation. Change
often begins at the margin. The central actors in American higher
education as we have known it it in recent decades have been the
administrators, the tenured faculty, and the students. Adjunct faculty
have been marginal. Significantly, however, nonacademic staff have been
almost equally marginal. They have been similarly condescended to,
whatever their intellectual attainments. I am thinking, above all, of
three categories of nonfaculty campus professional: the librarian, the
museum curator, and the director of academic computing. If Peter Drucker
is right and if thirty years from now the university as we have known it
is no more,(7) are we to assume
that the university library, the university art museum, and the various
university data bases and computer networks will also have shut down?
Let me suggest, to the contrary, that if and when the university as such
is out of business, all three of these may still be in business
supporting, among others, those unsalaried irregulars who will succeed
the salaried professors as carriers of the humane tradition in American
learning. An alliance of the now marginal may inherit what will remain
of the center.

Is there a word for such people? What do you call an extra-academic
humanist, a man or woman with a trained mind who does not make his or
her living as a teacher? The term that comes most readily to hand, I
submit, is intellectual. If intellectuals, paid or unpaid,
succeed today's academics as the principal carriers of the humane
tradition, even granting that these terms are not mutually exclusive,
what difference will the succession make to the tradition itself? What
are the differences between an academic and an intellectual?

Three Differences Between an Academic and an Intellectual

As a Harvard humanities Ph.D. most of whose postgraduation career has
transpired outside academe, I have been invited several times to speak
to graduate students about the other careers for which their doctorates
may prepare them. In retrospect, although I myself gained from being
forced to review how leaving academe had changed me, I rather regret
accepting those invitations.

I regret accepting them in the first place because, although I may
have left behind a useful tip or two, I did the graduate students a
disservice by lending credence to the view that American-style doctoral
education makes sense as a preparation for a wide variety of careers. I
doubt that it does. While it is difficult ever to say what portion of a
man or woman's knowledge will not someday be useful, the
full-blown humanities doctorate -- particularly if it is followed by
long years of probationary appointments and then a negative tenure
decision -- grievously delays a young person's entry into the general
marketplace, burdens him or her with enormous debt, and inculcates over
the years the self-destructive habit of constant subtle deference.
Humane learning has many uses in the general marketplace, but the
baroque peculiarity of American doctoral education produces an animal
hyper-adapted to the baroque peculiarity of the American academic
habitat.

I regret accepting those invitations to speak to graduate students in
the second place because my remarks encouraged the faculty to begin with
themselves and work outward into the culture rather than begin with the
culture and work backward to themselves. To a point, American culture
has the same relationship to the humanities and the fine arts that
business has to business education, medicine to medical education, and
so forth. For the humanities and the fine arts, American culture is the
market as in the "market-model university" mentioned earlier.
And yet classic liberal arts education and research clearly differ from
professional training for book publishing, journalism, music, commercial
art, film-making, advertising, scriptwriting, pastoral ministry, and the
other gainful occupations in which the humanities and the fine arts
figure. For all of the occupations just mentioned and a good many more,
professional training programs exist. It is to these programs rather
than to the humanities Ph.D. that a consideration of the liberal arts
market would lead by induction.

Unfortunately, these training programs, not to disparage them, do not
meet American culture's broader needs for preservation and refreshment.
Although it would indeed be a salutary exercise for liberal arts faculty
to ask what and how they would teach if they taught their traditional
subjects in as directly market-responsive a way as possible, a still
more salutary exercise would be for them -- and for any American who
reads and thinks -- to ask what is entailed in an engagement with the
subject matter of the liberal arts that is not defined in any way
by the needs of students or the preferences of teachers.

The learned fraternity of college teaching attracts those who are
attracted by fraternity in general, but what some find sustaining others
find confining. Similarly, the quasi-parental relationship of teacher to
student deeply touches some but alienates others, who crave the
unprotected clash of interaction with fellow adults and feel chronically
disappointed in the classroom. Lisa Lewis in her melancholy poem
"My Students" manages to voice what many feel but few admit:

I walk into the classroom on time every day.
I write funny things on the board, and I'm hurt
When no one laughs, though I know my students
Are stupid; I grade their papers.(8)

Not all who are attracted by teaching teach well, nor do all who have
excelled in the larger world teach poorly. Not all who crave the larger
world thrive in it, and some who thrive in it long to flee it.
Nonetheless, at a first approximation, the difference between an
academic and an intellectual may be stated as follows: An academic
has and wants an audience disproportionately made up of teachers and
students, while an intellectual has and wants teachers and students in
his audience only in proportion to their place in the general educated
public.

The second difference between an academic and an intellectual is the
familiar difference between a specialist and a generalist, the academic
being the specialist and the intellectual the generalist. There are
those who think that an academic who sometimes writes for a popular
audience becomes a generalist on those occasions, but this is a mistaken
view. A specialist may make do as a popularizer by deploying his
specialized education with a facile style. A generalist must write from
the full breadth of a general education that has not ended at graduation
or been confined to a discipline. If I may judge from my ten years'
experience in book publishing, what the average humanities academic
produces when s/he sets out to write for "the larger audience"
is a popularizer's restatement of specialized knowledge, while what the
larger audience responds to is something quite different: It is
specialized knowledge sharply reconceptualized and resituated in an
enlarged context.

The generalist assumes, as the specialist too seldom does, that he is
writing for readers no less intelligent than himself but trained in
other areas. How does one prepare to write for such readers? One does so
by spending as much time as one can visiting them, intellectually
speaking, dropping in on them, observing what portion of what one
happens to know seems to "travel," as publishers say, and what
portion does not. The born academic, as he begins to do this, will feel
that he is wasting time better spent in deepening his knowledge of his
specialty. The born intellectual will count such wandering as time well
spent on his general education.

It is not that, as an intellectual, one can or should seek to
subordinate everybody else's knowledge to one's own grand purposes. Even
G. W. F. Hegel arrived too late to do that, and no one has
tried since. What is called for, paradoxically, is less a store of
knowledge than a "store" of ignorance. By forcing oneself to
go where one is oneself the blinking beginner rather than the seasoned
expert, one learns to turn one's own narrow intellectual sophistication
into a broadened version of itself. A generalist is someone with a
keener-than-average awareness of how much there is to be ignorant about.
In this way, generalization as a style of writing is decidedly different
from mere simplification or popularization. If a specialist is someone
who knows more and more about less and less, a generalist is
unapologetically someone who knows less and less about more and more.
Both forms of knowledge are genuine and legitimate. Someone who acquires
a great deal of knowledge about one field grows in knowledge, but so
does someone who acquires a little knowledge about many fields. Knowing
more and more about less and less tends to breed confidence. Knowing
less and less about more and more tends to breed humility.
Popularization, which certainly has its place, conveys the specialist's
confidence but also his or her isolation. Generalization conveys the
generalist's diffidence but also his or her connectedness and openness
to further connections. Something like this, to repeat, is the core
difference between the academic and the intellectual in action on the page.

A secretary of culture, to return to that mental experiment, should
want both generalists and specialists on his staff, but he would be
ill-advised to regard the generalist as the specialist simplified.
Though it would be overstating things to claim that the generalist is
like the conductor of an orchestra who masters the full score while the
instrumentalists master only their lines within it, it would be fair to
say something a bit humbler -- namely, that the generalist is like a
music lover who brings a pocket score to the concert and tries to read
the performance analytically while hearing it synthetically.

A secretary of culture might be well advised to recruit generalists
from the country's publishing houses rather than from its universities,
for at the publishing houses the incentive structure favors
generalization, while at the universities it overwhelmingly favors
specialization, even when latter-day rhetoric says otherwise.
"Cobbler, stick to your last" is still the operative rule on
campus; and if it occurs to the cobbler that the tools he has been using
to produce boots can also produce gloves, let him not suppose that his
annual quota of boots will be reduced to accommodate this new line of
manufacture. A contrary assumption is absurdly dominant: Only he who has
produced a perfect boot can be trusted to make a glove worth wearing.
This assumption is implicit in a tart statement by a participant in a
recent discussion of "public intellectuals" at the University
of Chicago:

Public intellectuals
are academics who become journalists while maintaining their posts in
colleges and universities. The publics they serve can generally be
identified with the readership of relatively low-circulation magazines
and tabloid format periodicals like The New Republic, The Nation,
The New York Review of Books, the literary section of The New
York Times, and the TLS. Their numbers have been
increasing over the past decade. In the increasingly celebrity-conscious
business of running a private university, some of them, I'm told, have
become superstars. After superstar, nova. After nova, black hole. I
think, at least, that this is the way it works.(9)

A great many senior faculty share these disgruntled sentiments, and
junior faculty, acutely aware of how senior faculty feel, usually
conduct themselves accordingly. Which is to say: they allow themselves
to be inhibited from attempting much public intellectualism or other
adventurism lest their senior colleagues hold it vindictively against
them. Who in academe has not heard of a generalist effort dismissed at
the departmental meeting with an arch witticism or discounted as
publicity hunger at merit raise time? In this way, the stalwarts of the
discipline make themselves into highly effective disciplinarians indeed!
The culture of specialization which they thus inculcate is not easily
escaped even by those who would wish to do so, even by those who think
they have done so. I pass over as beneath comment the political
correctness imposed on occasion by authoritarian university
administrations.

A secretary of culture in need of generalists as well as specialists
would need to bear in mind, above all, that academic life proceeds by
the channeling of curiosity, which is to say by the benign but
systematic suppression of unchanneled, general curiosity. I do not
intend to demean. The university's division of learning has led to one
breakthrough after another. And yet the methodical channeling of effort
is of necessity a confinement as well. Academics, if they are to succeed
in their world, simply must suppress their natural inclination to
"go off on a tangent." Academe requires this of them, and the
sacrifice they make in meeting the requirement should be honored.
However, what academe requires and what the culture as a whole requires
are not always identical. Sometimes, what the culture requires is a mind
stocked with the memory of innumerable tangential excursions rather than
with the harvest of the long, hard, stay-at-home cultivation of a given field.

To confinement by field, academe too often adds a further, more
interpersonal deformation. A typical newly tenured associate professor
will have spent six years or more anxiously mind-reading his senior
professors and at least another six years doing the same for his senior
colleagues, and this is the best, most expeditious case. If a first
negative tenure decision is followed by a second, doubly anxious
six-year apprenticeship in a second university, a generation may have
passed between the start of graduate school and the acquisition of
tenure. It would be unrealistic to expect a man or woman to recover in
the twentieth year all the daring that he or she has painstakingly
suppressed during the preceding nineteen.

The difference between an intellectual and an academic, then, lies in
the greater freedom that the intellectual has to be, without penalty, an
explorer and a generalist. There are, of course, a gifted few academics
who manage, once they have secured their specialist reputations and
attained the rank of full professor, to become accomplished generalists.
There are also many self-conscious intellectuals ensconced in academe
who from the start would fain see teaching and even their nominal
academic specialization itself as just a day job. But theirs is a
somewhat unstable posture inasmuch as for them, as for all academics,
specialization is not a matter of choice. The division of labor is the
very organizational principle of the university. Unless that principle
is respected, the university simply fails to be itself. The pressure,
therefore, is constant and massive to suppress random curiosity and
foster, instead, only a carefully channeled, disciplined curiosity.
Because of this, many who set out, brave and cocky, to take academe as a
base for their larger, less programmed intellectual activity, who are
confident that they can be in academe but not of it, succumb to its
culture over time.

The human mind does not naturally or spontaneously remain in
externally appointed channels. Only intense training and steady policing
can make it perform in this way. Prodigies of learning result from this
channeling, as already conceded, but limitation and blindness result as
well. It takes years of disciplined preparation to become an academic.
It takes years of undisciplined preparation to become an intellectual.
For a great many academics, the impulse to break free, to run wild,
simply comes too late for effective realization.

In sum, then, the second difference between an academic and an
intellectual may be stated as follows: An academic is a specialist
who has disciplined his curiosity to operate largely within a designated
area, while an intellectual is a generalist who deliberately does
otherwise.

The third difference between an intellectual and an academic is the
relative attachment of each to writing as a fine rather than a merely
practical art. "If you happen to write well," Gustave Flaubert
once wrote, "you are accused of lacking ideas."(10)
The experience behind Flaubert's remark is one many contemporary writers
will recognize all too well. I once interviewed Saul Bellow for the Los
Angeles Times, and one of the subjects Bellow mentioned in passing
was his relationship to a certain eminent sociologist at the University
of Chicago. For this gentleman, Bellow's fiction, the novelist told me,
was a kind of "light entertainment." Condescension toward
belles lettres remains pervasive in academe, even, strangely enough, in
literary criticism.

It is true, of course, that a sociologist of knowledge like Bellow's
colleague can accommodate a novelist like Bellow in a theory of
knowledge, but then a novelist like Bellow can return the favor by
making the sociologist a character in a story. The stratagems are
exactly parallel. Each explains that which he finds less important by
including it in that which he finds more important or over which he
exercises greater power. Each defeats his enemy by ingesting him. The
English novelist Antonia Byatt is a professor of English literature who
knows that narratology can comprehend many varieties of novelist in a
single theoretical perspective, but then Byatt is also a novelist and
has also published a novel in which the protagonist is a
narratologist.(11)

My point is not that the fiction of a Bellow or a Byatt deserves more
respect as sustained thought than it usually receives, although it does,
but that it deserves and often enough wins respect as art -- that is, as
an aesthetic end in itself -- beyond anything to which the vast majority
of social scientists even aspire. This is the third criterion by which,
as I see the matter, academics differ from intellectuals. An academic is
honored for "making a contribution to the field" whether his
contribution was well written or not. A novelist, by contrast, never
seeks to make a contribution to the "field" of fiction. No
art-writer, whatever the genre, does that. Writers are too selfish, too
concerned with themselves, to work that way, and they offer their work
too widely to know for whom they are writing. An intellectual novelist
does not have, as a professor of English does, an audience defined in
advance. More than that, though, a work of written art is in the fullest
sense of the phrase a finished product, the end of a line, a last word.
The art historian in every artist knows that he had predecessors and
will have successors, but the artist in him stops in a perfected moment.

For this reason, expression counts more for an intellectual than for
an academic. It does so as well because, for an intellectual, the link
of the work to the self is greater. The literary enterprise is not
communal but personal, and therefore the author of a literary work wants
it not just acknowledged but loved. The novelist or poet may be the pure
example of this kind of desire, but to the extent that any research is
published as art rather than as science, its author will have something
crucially in common with the novelist or poet.

With this criterion in mind, a secretary of culture who wanted to
ascertain which academics might be worth hiring away from their usual
pursuits to work as generalists might well begin by asking candidates to
tell him about the last novel they had read or the last poem. If they
answered that they did not read fiction or poetry, he might ask what,
then, they did read for pleasure. And if they answered that they did not
read for pleasure, he would pass them over, for no one can provide
pleasure who never seeks pleasure, and no one who never reads for beauty
will ever write beautifully.

I bring up writing as a category in its own right because the
attitude taken toward it in academe is so often narrowly instrumental:
writing as just a tool to get the job done. Clarity is the only real
virtue for an instrumentalist; any other values that might be named are
merely ornamental. To compliment a great scholar on his beautiful style
is, in the usual case, as much a breach of decorum as complimenting him
on his lovely complexion. It may be true, but if he hears dismissal in
the compliment, he hears -- as did Flaubert -- only what was probably
intended. To restate all this as a third thesis on the difference
between an academic and an intellectual, I submit: An academic is
concerned with substance and suspicious of style, while an intellectual
is suspicious of any substance that purports to transcend or defy style.

Shelter for the Homeless Humanities

The voguish phrase public intellectual is at least
temporarily useful, but most public intellectuals would be more
accurately called public academics; for even as they turn their
attention to matters of public interest, they retain their academic
appointments and, for much of their professional life, their academic
constituency as well. If all intellectuals are understood to have the
public as their sole defining constituency, then the adjective public
in public intellectual becomes redundant, and the public
academic is correctly seen as a mixed or transitional type, an academic
moonlighting or auditioning as an intellectual.

This is not to say that academics who moonlight as intellectuals are
no different from academics who stick to their day jobs. There is a
striking difference between the two groups, one that shines forth in the
complaints commonly lodged against public intellectuals by their
"straight" academic colleagues -- namely, that the public
intellectuals desert their erstwhile disciplines, neglect the normal
functions of their university departments, and excuse themselves from
much contact with students, all the while drawing a comfortable academic
salary. Resentment at such behavior on the part of those left behind to
pick up the pieces is understandable. For the purposes of this
discussion, however, I can only note with interest how well the
offenders usually illustrate the three criteria mentioned above. They
prefer to deal with adults rather than with youth; they address the
public agenda in all its variety rather than the agenda of a discipline;
and they cultivate a literary style a notch above the average for the
fraternity they would transcend. In short, they do just what I would
predict academics must do if they would change into intellectuals.

To consummate this transformation, the academic should ideally
renounce his or her academic appointment, and some eventually do just
this. Garry Wills, who resigned his appointment at Northwestern
University not long ago, is a case in point. The deeper question,
however, is whether, for those who foresee that the public conversation
will be their destination, academe need be the starting point at all.
Knowledge will always be necessary, and study will always be necessary
to acquire knowledge, but the credentials of doctorate and tenure are
another matter. A rose by another name would smell as sweet. An adjunct
professor, a graduate student, a layman who knew as much as the dean of
the graduate school and who could talk as well to a general audience
would have, in principle, an identical claim on that audience. Moreover,
to the extent that the dean borrows authority in the public forum from
the assumption that academe is a haven for humane learning, he or she
trades, increasingly, on a false assumption. It is as if an ambassador
from a foreign capital were to offer political advice while, back home,
his government was about to fall.

To return to my premise, if the role of academics in the preservation
and propagation of liberal learning is shrinking as the liberal arts are
crowded out of the university curriculum, then either the role of
intellectuals -- men and women of humane learning whose gainful
occupation is not teaching -- will grow, or the humane tradition will
slide further into decline. If and when that compensatory growth comes
about, however, there may come with it a number of now only poorly
predictable changes.

As academe eliminates the liberal arts, institutions and forms of
organization that are now secondary will become primary by academe's
default. Peter Drucker does not predict that university libraries,
museums, databases, and computer networks will be gone in thirty years
when the university as we know it is gone. But if their likely survival
throws their importance into relief, it does so as well for kindred
institutions that have never been under university auspices at all:
endowed research libraries, independent museums of various kinds, and
the many voluntary associations and working groups that the Internet
already makes possible. Already, a scholar in search of an
out-of-the-way, out-of-print book may have better luck with
Bibliofind.com, which offers "nine million used, antiquarian and
rare books, periodicals and ephemera offered for sale by thousands of
booksellers around the world" than with a local university library,
even a large one. Whether or not venture capital invested in online
education succeeds in capturing much of the revenue flow that now
sustains traditional colleges and universities, the Internet stands
ready as a monastery-on-demand for the dark age after the Rome that is
the academic establishment has fallen. When Rome fell, the Roman Empire
did not vanish. Its separate parts lived on in other forms. So it could
be for the campus liberal arts empire: When it falls, it too will not
vanish but live on as its separate parts assume other forms.

Academics are farmers. They have fields, and they cultivate their
fields well. Intellectuals are hunters. An intellectual does not have a
field but a quarry which he pursues across as many fields as necessary,
often losing sight of it altogether. Hunters cannot replace farmers, or
vice versa; but if liberal learning in America, hitherto mostly a farm
culture, becomes progressively a hunt culture, there will surely be
consequences. By the standards of farmers, what hunters do seems
reckless and undisciplined, but hunting has its own interior logic, the
logic of an agenda that is individually rather than collectively
determined.

One cannot easily be either a farmer or a professor by avocation. The
strength of these vocations is that they demand full commitment.
Mirroring their strength, their great vulnerability is their inability
effectively to reward and sustain partial commitment. By contrast, one
may rather easily be a hunter or an intellectual by avocation. Like
hunters, who join the chase when they can and leave it when they must,
sharing the kill with the tribe when they are successful, so
intellectuals study when they can and stop when they must, seeking ever
to please themselves but sharing their intellectual pleasure, when they
write, with their readers.

The agricultural revolution did not occur for no reason. Hunters are
more likely to go hungry than farmers. If academics, reliably supported
by their universities, are succeeded by intellectuals, only unreliably
supported by the work they pick up here and there, the post- and
extra-academic humanities will often go hungry and homeless. But hunting
does not differ from farming only by being more hazardous and less
reliable. Off campus, the liberal arts may, at least on occasion, enjoy
a wild adventure and an extraordinary feast. Only time will tell -- but
less time, if present trends continue, than we might think.

Notes

1. [Back to text] James
Engell and Anthony Dangerfield, "The Market-Model University,
Humanities in the Age of Money," Harvard magazine,
May-June 1998: 50. In common usage, the phrase liberal arts and
the newer term humanities are synonymous, and I use them so in
this article. Since the medieval quadrivium included music, I
would be happy if, by extension, the modern liberal arts could be
understood to include the fine arts as well as the humanities.
Certainly, the place of the fine arts in the higher education curriculum
is at least as eroded as Engell and Dangerfield show the place of the
humanities to be. See also William H. Honan, "Small Liberal
Arts College Facing Questions on Focus," New York Times,
March 10, 1999. The College Majors Handbook: A Guide to
Your Undergraduate College Investment Decision, by Paul Thomas and
Tom Harrington (JIST Works, 1998), says that the claim that a diverse
curriculum is the best preparation for the marketplace is refuted by the
pay histories of the 150,000 recent college graduates they studied.
Education for the market is not education for life, but then education
for life need not be sought only at school.

2. [Back to text]
Michael Walzer, "The Underworked American," New Republic,
September 22, 1997. See also Brent Staples, "The End of
Tenure? When Colleges Turn to Migrant Labor," New York Times,
June 20, 1997

3. [Back to text]
Private remarks to the author. See also, Joseph Berger, "After Her
Ph.D., A Scavenger's Life, A Temp Professor Among Thousands," New
York Times, March 8, 1998. Berger reports that temps are
responsible for more than half of all teaching at the City University of
New York.

4. [Back to text] Mark R.
Kelley, William Pannapacker, and Ed Wiltse, "Scholarly Associations
Must Face the True Causes of the Academic Job Crisis," The
Chronicle of Higher Education, December 18, 1998, B5.

5. [Back to text] On the
durability of this trend, see Courtney Leatherman, "Growth in
Positions Off the Tenure Track Is a Trend That's Here to Stay, Study
Finds," The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 9,
1999, A14-A16.

7. [Back to text] A
prediction often made and often cited. See, for example, Peter Applebome
citing Nancy S. Dye, president of Oberlin College, quoting Drucker
in "The on-line revolution is not the end of civilization as we
know it. But almost. Education.com," New York Times, April 4, 1999.

9. [Back to text] Joel
Snyder, "Public Intellectuals: Threat or [sic]
Menace," at the conference, "Public Intellectuals and the
Future of Graduate Study," University of Chicago, June 11,
1997, transcript of spoken remarks.

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Fall 1999, Vol. 49 Issue 3.